In today's fast-paced environment, it is often necessary to form a team quickly to address some subject. Many traditional institutions are not well suited for collaboration among team members. For example, academic institutions and accrediting agencies typically focus on individual performance rather than team accomplishments. A conventional education degree is awarded to an individual rather than a group of people. In some situations, however, it may irrelevant to an employer whether an individual or a group of individuals possess a required set of skills and knowledge. For example, a consulting team may claim expertise in network security. An employer hiring this team may be unconcerned about how network security knowledge is divided among the team members. The employer may just care that the consulting team possesses the network security knowledge.
A team is often constituted of individuals with specific skills, some of which may be unique to the team. No single member of the team may be familiar with the entire subject, yet all team members may need to contribute with knowledge of various aspects of the subject. It is currently difficult to replace team members with others, in the event that a team member becomes unavailable for personal reasons, or because some higher-priority subject requires his or her skills. Furthermore, it may also be the case that a team must study a subject or some domain of expertise in order to satisfactorily perform its objective. No single student may necessarily have the time to learn all of the necessary material. Conventional team environments are generally unsuited to deal with such responsibility apportionment to selected team members in a manner that reflects the collective knowledge, skills and experience of a team.